"I can’t see why people loves this game so much, it’s just a strange and messy Alone in The Dark rip off, nothing fancy."

I remember having read something about this game being a masterpiece, one of the better Game Cube games, and, to sum up, the eight wonder of the world. I didn’t give a damn to be honest, I wasn’t very interested on it right from the beginning, but that is a good thing because when you approach something with low expectations in the end normally everything is better than expected, but this wasn’t the case, I found this game to be average all the way till the end, so I can’t get all the hype, and I have no choice but to consider this the official “most overrated and over-hyped Game Cube game to date”, even more than The Wind Waker, and that sure is saying something.

Story:
The plot is very odd and confusing, and to be honest, I have not understood absolutely anything in the end, not that I care anyway, because it was not something specially good or interesting. The plot is something about a girl whose uncle or grandpa (I can’t remember very well) got killed and once in his mansion you find out that he was studying black magic as well as some obscure legends and that stuff. The girl (whose name I have also forgotten now that I come to think) sees all that stuff and decides that will help to investigate the reasons why he has been killed, so she starts searching.

While researching, we are going to find pages of our relative’s investigations, and then we will have to help a weird bunch of characters from different eras that are battling against I don’t know who who wants to do something that I have not understood but that probably is very dangerous because it has something to do with the awakening of some kind of evil (I suppose) demon.

A big mess as a whole, the characters keep talking non senses all the time and we meet a lot of weirdoes that apparently have nothing to do with the story but that in the end get, somehow, involved. Too confusing for my tastes, and boring to boot, I didn’t liked it.

Graphics 9/10:
Mmmnn… hard to rate in my opinion, they are excellent no doubt about that, I mean, never Sons of Liberty, The Wind Waker, or Final Fantasy X quality, but truly good. If I say that they are hard to rate that is because while excellent they are not too impressive, they are not impressive at all I would say, just very polished and smooth but unimpressive graphics. There are some sequences anyway that don’t look to good, specially during some cut scenes, there are some objects that are out of place, like when we see a door that leads to a forest made using a blurry sprite, that doesn’t look exactly good. What I liked the most about the graphics are those mummies with bright eyes, and the landscapes painted on the pictures on the mansion, that reminded me about how beautiful hand drawn backgrounds are and how beautiful the game could have been with them instead of this dull 3D environments.

I didn’t liked the graphics as you can see, the characters are very ugly and I didn’t liked the overall design of the game, however, I can’t help but to admit that they are excellent, so that is it.

Music 4/10:
Exactly what I was expecting, that is, hardly any music. The only thing I liked (just a little) was the fact that there are quite a lot of short tunes made using a lot of voices, like if a chorus were singing, that is nice, that kind of music is always very nice. But that is all, aside from of few short and very soft tunes here and a little sound there is nothing much to say or to hear, it is true that sometimes it is quite atmospheric, but nothing worth mentioning, you are not going to remember a thing about the soundtrack after finishing the game.

The voice acting is quite good in the other hand, really good, and something that I specially liked about it is that the voices are not the same ones we use to hear in every single video game, or at least I can’t remember having heard none of the voices before. Very good voice acting.

Gameplay 7/10:
This game reminded me a lot to the very first Alone in The Dark game, and well, I guess that is because this game is quite similar.

The combats, like the plot, are a bit messy, the game has fixed camera views, which is something great, but due to that sometimes we are going to have trouble fighting because we are not going to see clearly where the enemies are. A interesting feature is that we are able to choose where to attack an enemy, its arms, head, torso, etc, and as they are mostly undead, it is relatively easy dismembered, and if we cut off their head for example then they are not going to be able to see where to attack. Nice. Aside from that there is nothing much to say, the battles are very standard, some of the characters could have had faster attacks, but overall it was an effective battle system.

Unlike the battle system, the magic system is not very good I think, we have the possibility to find our spells and investigate new ones which is something interesting at a first glance, but what we have to do to create them is not all that satisfactory, and then the spells are very slow and dull, they are hard to use so only the recovery spells are going to be useful, specially while recovering our sanity bar.

Also, we have a Sanity Meter, which ends up being a very frustrating feature, never like that damned Risk bar from Vagrant Story but frustrating nevertheless. That bar represents our character’s sanity, if we run out of it (of sanity) we are going to start to hallucinate, which is going to make us loose time because sometimes we are not going to be able to play properly. To recover our sanity we need specific items, spells, or the most usual way, by using finishing moves with our enemies (by stabbing them while they are in floor).

The puzzles are a very important part of the game, most of time everything consists on solving easy puzzles that normally involve finding and using an object in the right place, combining objects, or using our magic skills to reach new areas or “lit up” things. I didn’t liked the puzzles after a while because they make everything slower and they are repetitive and uninteresting, and they are not exactly original or imaginative. Very standard and dull puzzles.

I have heard some people say that this is a survival horror game, or that at least I had some survival horror elements, which is true, it has some, and it is based in Alone if The Dark, which yeah, maybe it is as scary as a Goosebumps episode, but it was a survival horror game anyway, but I also think that is pretty obvious that this is not a horror game, it has some very scary parts that is also undeniable, there is a particular scene when you enter a bathroom that sure scared the hell out of me, and sometimes there are some really creepy sounds, but that is all, a few punctual scare and nothing more, for me this was just an adventure game more than anything, I would never call this a survival horror game, and if it were one, it fails criminally trying to be scary.

In my opinion this could have been a better game without so many puzzles and stupid dialogue and more action, with so much variety and so many situations this could have easily been a top notch action game, but the puzzles make everything slow.

Anyway, there is nothing wrong with the gameplay aside from the combats, and only sometimes, most of the time they are fine, but I don’t know, I found everything to be way too repetitive and uninteresting, there is plenty of variety due to the high number of characters and everything as I said before, but as nothing makes any sense playing ends up being a little bit dull and monotonous.

Difficulty:
Not exactly hard I would say, the puzzles as are quite easy in general, and the enemies are dispatched effortlessly, some bosses (or well, those big enemies with three heads, I don’t know if it is ok to call them bosses) can get tough later in the game, and sometimes it is possible to get stuck without knowing what to do, but I would call this a hard game.

Replay Value:
I can’t see a reason to replay the game, and as far as I have seen there are no important secrets or anything. I would say that there is no replay value at all because the game is long enough to make you stay away from it once finished.

My conclusion:
I don’t know why people talks about this game so much, it is just an average adventure game with fancy graphics and a stupid and messy plot, yeah it has some nice features, but nothing revolutionary, this game was nothing special for me, it is well done in almost every way, but in my opinion this is just an slightly above average adventure game without any coherency, and not all that fun either.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/29/04